The last decade has marked the growing visibility and worldwide interest in Israeli cinema. Films such as Walk on Water, Or, My Treasure, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir have been commercially and ...critically successful both in Europe and the United States and have won a number of prestigious international awards. This book examines for the first time the new ideological and aesthetic trends in contemporary Israeli cinema. More specifically, it critically explores the complex and crucial role of Israeli cinema in remembering and restaging traumas and losses that were denied entry into the shared national past.
One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema is the number and scope of films dealing with past traumatic events - events that were repressed or insufficiently mourned, such as the memory of the Holocaust, traumas from wars and terrorist attacks, and the losses entailed by the experience of immigration. Current Israeli cinema exposes and highlights a radical discontinuity between history and memory. Traumatic events from Israeli society's past are represented as the private memory of distinct social groups - soldiers, immigrants, women, queers - and not as collective memory, as a lived and practiced tradition that conditions Israeli society. This detachment from national collective memory pulls the films into a world marked by a persistent blurring of the historical context and by private and subjective impressions - a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and myths. These groups feel duty-bound to remember the past, recasting repressed memories through the cinema in order to return and to give meaning to their identity.
The desire for justice can escalate or facilitate resolution of intergroup conflicts. Two studies investigated retributive and restorative notions of justice as the mediating factor of the effect of ...perceived outgroup sentience—an aspect of (mechanistic) dehumanization referring to the emotional depth attributed to others—on intergroup conflict resolution. Study 1 showed that for Palestinians, who see themselves as victims, perceived sentience of Israelis decreased retributive but increased restorative notions of justice, which, ultimately, increased support for conflict resolution by negotiation rather than political violence. Study 2 partially replicated Study 1’s findings with Jewish Israelis. The role of perceived sentience and its relationship to retributive and restorative notions of justice in protracted and nonprotracted conflicts and their resolution is discussed.
Classical-liberal arguments about the pacifying effects of international trade are revisited, and it is argued that they consistently refer to the ability of trade to provide 'connections' between ...people and to create a perceived 'global community'. Dependency and openness are commonly used to test for any pacifying effects of trade in the current literature, but these measures fail to capture some of the classical liberals' key insights. Several network measures are introduced in order to give natural expression to and to develop the classical-liberal view that trade linkages reduce interstate conflict. These measures applied to trade flows are incorporated in the Russett & Oneal triangulating-peace model. The main results are that trade networks are indeed pacifying in that both direct and indirect trade linkages matter, and as the global trade network has become more dense over time, the importance of indirect links by way of specific third countries has declined, and the general embeddedness of state dyads in the trade network has become more relevant. These findings suggest that the period since World War II has seen progressive realization of the classical-liberal ideal of a security community of trading states.
The present study examined how Israelis and Palestinians present their narratives related to their conflict in school textbooks used by the state educational system and the ultraorthodox community in ...Israel and by all Palestinian schools in Palestinian National Territories. The focus was on how each side portrays the Other and their own group. The content analysis was based on a developed conceptual framework and standardized and manualized rating criteria with quantitative and qualitative aspects. The results showed in general that (1) dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the Other are rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books; (2) both Israeli and Palestinian books present unilateral national narratives that portray the Other as enemy, chronicle negative actions by the Other directed at the self-community, and portray the self-community in positive terms with actions aimed at self-protection and goals of peace; (3), there is lack of information about the religions, culture, economic and daily activities of the Other, or even of the existence of the Other on maps; (4) the negative bias in portrayal of the Other, the positive bias in portrayal of the self, and the absence of images and information about the Other are all statistically significantly more pronounced in Israeli Ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian books than in Israeli state books.
Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than ...as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans' attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.
A formal model of crisis bargaining in the shadow of leadership turnover is analyzed where (1) successive leaders of the same state may differ in their resolve, (2) their resolve is private ...information, and (3) the probability of leadership turnover depends on bargaining behavior and conflict outcomes. The model provides novel answers to a number of questions about the relationship between an incumbent's time in office, the prospects of losing office, the anticipated behavior of future leaders, and the current probability of conflict. Taken together, these results add further weight to recent claims that leaders, not states, should be considered the fundamental units of analysis in international relations.
We propose a framework for forecasting and analyzing regional and international conflicts. It generates forecasts that (1) are accurate but account for uncertainty, (2) are produced in (near) real ...time, (3) capture actors' simultaneous behaviors, (4) incorporate prior beliefs, and (5) generate policy contingent forecasts. We combine the CAMEO event-coding framework with Markov-switching and Bayesian vector autoregression models to meet these goals. Our example produces a series of forecasts for material conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians for 2010. Our forecast is that the level of material conflict between these belligerents will increase in 2010, compared to 2009.
•A history of territorial struggles strengthened the ability of some groups of indigenous peoples in Brazil to combat COVID-19.•Indigenous led self-protection and resistance counter government ...‘politics of extermination’ and ‘genocide by omission'.•Strategies included: self-isolation and blockades, social media campaigns and fundraising, and court cases against the government.•Despite violence and repression, the indigenous movement has grown and is better positioned to fight the pandemic than it was a decade ago.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic due to limited access to an already precarious public health system together with continued attacks on their cultures, their territories and their way of life. These attacks come as part of the government's attempts to further neoliberal development and undermine environmental and indigenous rights, taking advantage of what the Minister of Environment called 'a moment of calm while the press is focusing on the pandemic'. The pandemic has intensified environmental conflicts affecting indigenous peoples, both in amplifying conflicts but also in sparking new acts of resistance and self-protection of indigenous lives and territories. Based on case studies and monitoring of rapidly evolving social media and WhatsApp posts, we analyse these processes through a political ecology lens. We find confirmed cases and deaths amongst indigenous peoples centred around tourism hotspots, mining sites, and other development projects. Yet the presence of these risks, and long term conflicts related to land-grabbing and resource theft linked to said development, has in some cases strengthened community ties and increased capacity for active resistance. While some Mebengokrê (Kayapó) communities in the Amazon have fled further into the forest to maintain isolation, others have expelled gold-miners from their villages. Tupinambá and Pataxó communities in the Northeast have set up blockades to keep people, and the virus, out. The retomadas, or reclaiming of land, of the Tupinambá, Pataxó and Pataxó-Hãhãhai in Bahia State, are a case in point: the long-term struggle to reclaim their lands has strengthened community ties and capacity for active resistance. The recent road blockades of the Mebengokrê (Kayapó) incorporated demands for COVID-19 support into a long history of demands for compensation for the negative impacts suffered from mining and road construction in their territories. At the national level, indigenous movements, which have grown in strength and number in the fight against Bolsonaro's 'politics of extermination' and through engagement of a new cohort of indigenous youth who had access to higher education, were able to draw on social media and indigenous led court cases to help counteract the 'genocide by omission' that has been worsened by the pandemic.
A growing number of local energy conflicts around wind power and power-grid extensions are slowing down the deployment of the German Energiewende. In this paper, a local conflict on wind energy in ...the state of Baden-Württemberg is analysed in detail. In the little community of Engelsbrand, local opposition against a planned wind park was able to turn around a set of favourable a priori conditions, such as a supporting state government planning process, a local supporter group, a transparent planning process, including a majority vote pro wind energy, and a round table discussion. Distancing itself from the NIMBY-explanation (‘Not In My Back Yard’), the paper applies insights from discourse network analysis and micro-sociology in order to study the local conflict dynamics. Special attention is given to the resource mobilisation strategies of the opponents, including social networks, mass and social media use. The paper ends by drawing some general conclusions for the German Energiewende.
The collapse of Mobutu's Zaire and the arrival of father and son Kabila regimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter, the DRC) were hastened by the dramatic and tumultuous spread of ...violence from neighboring Rwanda. Mobutu's state's inability to manage the influx of Hutu refugees (with Interahamwe militia members interspersed) into the Kivu province of eastern Zaire from Rwanda's bloody genocide of 1994 or to compensate for the ratcheting up of their cross-border skirmishes with the Banyamulenge (Zairean Tutsi) population in 1996, exacerbated extant tensions and has since resulted in more than a dozen years of civil war. This example prompts us to ask: are countries with higher levels of state capacity better able to resist the spread of violence from neighboring territories into their own? The author argues that when falsely divided notions of spatial heterogeneity and dependence are interacted, contagion from neighboring conflicts becomes a risk of diminishing value for increasingly capable states. A model of civil war contagion affirms a conditional hypothesis, showing that state capacity modifies the likelihood that a state will become infected by a civil conflict occurring in neighboring territories.
